Application scope settings

[Serge Knystautas <se...@lokitech.com>]

I've written a little servlet that looks at the servlet context's
/WEB-INF/attributes.xml file, parses this as an XML document, and sets a
collection of name/value pairs as attributes on the servlet context. 
The attributes.xml looks something like this:

------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<-- no DTD written yet -->

<attributes>
    <attribute>
    	<name>dbconnfile</name>
    	<value>file:/usr/local/conndefinition.txt</value>
    </attribute>
</attributes>
------------------------------------------

We found this a convenient for configuring application specific settings
that our servlets and JSPs can use.  There's probably a better way to do
this, but this works for me (better approaches appreciated).  Can anyone
tell me a better place put this kind of code?  I'd rather this not be a
servlet and just part of the actual servlet engine as it will be easier
to distribute, and I think this would be a useful feature for others. 
If anyone can point me to the right package or classes to look through,
I'd be happy to send in a patch to incorporate this into Tomcat.

Serge Knystautas
Loki Technologies
http://www.lokitech.com/

Re: Application scope settings

[Hans Bergsten <ha...@gefionsoftware.com>]

Serge Knystautas wrote:
> 
> I've written a little servlet that looks at the servlet context's
> /WEB-INF/attributes.xml file, parses this as an XML document, and sets a
> collection of name/value pairs as attributes on the servlet context.

How is this different from setting context init parameters through
web.xml?

  <web-app>
    <context-param>
      <param-name>dbconnfile</param-name>
      <param-value>file:/usr/local/conndefinition.txt</param-value>
    </context-param>
  </web-app>

These parameters are accessible to servlets and JSPs in the application
though the ServletContext.getInitParameter() method.

Hans


> The attributes.xml looks something like this:
> 
> ------------------------------------------
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
> 
> <-- no DTD written yet -->
> 
> <attributes>
>     <attribute>
>         <name>dbconnfile</name>
>         <value>file:/usr/local/conndefinition.txt</value>
>     </attribute>
> </attributes>
> ------------------------------------------
> 
> We found this a convenient for configuring application specific settings
> that our servlets and JSPs can use.  There's probably a better way to do
> this, but this works for me (better approaches appreciated).  Can anyone
> tell me a better place put this kind of code?  I'd rather this not be a
> servlet and just part of the actual servlet engine as it will be easier
> to distribute, and I think this would be a useful feature for others.
> If anyone can point me to the right package or classes to look through,
> I'd be happy to send in a patch to incorporate this into Tomcat.
> 
> Serge Knystautas
> Loki Technologies
> http://www.lokitech.com/
> 
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-- 
Hans Bergsten		hans@gefionsoftware.com
Gefion Software		http://www.gefionsoftware.com